Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tollest, and in this week's episode, we're going to be looking at the role of the Lord Spiritual, aka the 26 Church of England bishops who sit in the upper chamber, and ask what role, if any, they should still be playing in parliamentary democracy in the 21st century. To help me discuss that our panel this week is Tommy Shepard, S&PMP and chair of the

humanist group in Parliament, Jess Sargent, Associate Director of the Institute for Government,

and Edward Stern, presenter of BBC Radio 4's Religious Affairs Program Sunday, who has just written

a book of the same name. So I'm going to start with you, Jess.

As I said, there are 26 church ring of bishops who sit in the House of Lords. Just explain to us

how we kind of got to the position. There have been lots of kind of Lord's reform over the years,

different bits, removing some of the hereditary peers, etc., etc. But the bishops have survived.

Just talk to us through how they ended up in this position where we have

these unelected, you know, appointed bishops in the upper chamber. So the role of the Lord's

spiritual kind of dates back to when Parliament was first kind of established when it first became

a feature of the UK constitution. And since then we have seen some reforms. So initially they used to outnumber the lords

temporal, who were the lords that are the non-bishops until Henry VIII, where their number was

quite greatly reduced. It was later in the 19th century that we saw that number reduced again

to the 26 that we have today. There was one further reform in order to get more women into those bishop

positions in 2015. There was a law pass that said that for the next 10 years, any vacancies

were taken by women. But other than that, as you say, although there have been lots of changes

to both the powers and the form of the House of Lords, the bishops so far have remained a fairly

consistent feature. Yeah, Edward, they kind of date back to kind of the House of Lords, the bishops so far have remained a fairly consistent

feature. Yeah, Edward, they kind of date back to kind of the feudal period. And it's a bit of an

oddity. I think it's only maybe the Vatican City and possibly Iran and Belize as well, as a member

of the Belize Senate, I think, is appointed by the Council of Churches, you know, that has this kind

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